Ask HN: What if karma was worth real money?

Sounds great, feel free to send your spare cash any time :-)

Hopefully you're not suggesting that it actually be worth money. That's ridiculous. If you mean what if it worked like money that might be interesting but I doubt it would be helpful.

What problem would that solve? How would that even be realistic the way you describe? This doesn't make any sense at all and here's why:

If karma is worth money then where does the initial money come from? Does PG give everyone 1500 to start like it's Monopoly? Do you put up the money yourself?

Assuming you put up your own money it just isn't fair. The richest of us get more influence and the poor get none. It'll actually work a lot like the real US economy.

Then, if karma is worth money then wouldnt it make sense to be able to withdraw it and use it in places other than HN? So what if you get people hoarding karma then they withdraw it all and end up with one. Imagine some of the very well respected people here suddenly having no karma at all because they withdrew it and spend it on a new computer.

It's just not realistic and it defeats the whole purpose of karma. If it's only good on HN then it isn't worth money. The way it works now is probably the fairest way possible. If karma is one measure of the quality of a user's contributions and how much respect they have earned then making karma work like money would totally undermine its value. Right now, karma is earned. In a money scenario there are more chances to game the system and skew it both positively and negatively for a user.

If you want to give someone money then check out their profile and see if you can either donate to one of their projects through PayPal or Flattr or something or you can just send an email and ask.

As a blogger, I can tell you it already is. When one of my links gets karma, it gets attention, and attention can be transmuted into revenue through the magic of advertisements.

But for me, blogging has nowt to do with making points nor money—I’ve only made a total of like $50 this year from the many hours I’ve spent writing. If I cared about money, I wouldn’t be wasting my time on my blog and vlog. What I do care about is having fun, making my ideas heard, and talking with new and interesting people.

Upvotes tell me how relevant my ideas are to the real world and other people’s interests, which in turn helps me become a better writer and a better thinker.

evincarofautumn mentioned this from one angle, but I too think that high karma levels on HN are already valuable. Just look at the false acclaim that gets heaped on every time patio11 posts something. It's not that he never posts anything worthwhile, but you can definitely see some wild responses that are directly attributable to Patrick's place high on the HN total karma list (like that thing on lionhearted's blog a couple of years ago, on how patio11 should charge people A LOT of money because he's like the smartest guy ever).

I suspect that many offers for consultation come in to HN's top commenters and many of the things they say get noticed above the sayings of the common pleb. If you have a high amount of karma, I think it's definitely worth some money.

If karma was real money I doubt anyone would ever post anything controversial in that you could lose your shirt.